Man of Steel

I’ve just seen the latest Superman film, Man of Steel, and I’ll say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was at first a little bit suspicious and uncertain as to quite what I was going to be getting here, after all this yet another re-invention of another super hero. However for this I think they’ve done it really well.

We do start off on Krypton as you might expect. We see the origins of Superman, even of Superman being given birth. We learn a great deal more about Krypton and about their race about what’s going on. We Meet General Zog, we meet Superman’s parents. I think I learnt more about his past from this Superman film than perhaps all the other Superman films put together.

From Krypton we do move to Earth where we first meet Superman as a young man and it’s in turn through a series of flashbacks we then see some of his earlier life. This I think perhaps a little bit confusing at times, I don’t think it flowed particularly well. I’d have loved to have seen more of Superman as a child, as he discovers and explores these powers that he has and in turn how he and his earth parents sort out and live with this situation. We do see him doing his super human stuff and obviously Lois Lane catching on to the fact that somewhere out there there’s this rather unusual character who as well as doing some amazing things seems to drop out of life straight afterwards.
Then in turn we move on to the arrival of General Zog and his accomplices in from space, and now we have a kind of triangle situation of Earth authorities, Superman and General Zog; who are the good guys who are the bad guys which of course does get resolved in the end.

Now this is, I was going to say it is a darker Superman than what we’ve seen before, but perhaps more serious might be a better way of putting it. This is not the Superman we’ve seen where he’s off to save the world but quickly diverts off away just to save a cat stuck up a tree for an old granny, this is in fact a Clark Kent who steals clothes out of the back of someone’s car because it suits him at the time. What’s more this is obviously not a rich person, just an ordinary working guy, yet Clark Kent steals from him. So as well as being a superman he is also very human as well.

Anyway, a really great film. I did see it in 2D and if I go and see it again (and I probably will) I expect to stay with the 2D version. It’s quite a long film, I went a for a 6 pm screening and didn’t leave the cinema till quarter to nine, so even allowing for adverts and trailers it is quite lengthy, and I just wonder if it wasn’t perhaps a little too long.

I think the development of Clark Kent growing up could have been done a little bit better. The final conflict fight scenes had some great graphics and some of the best CGI I’ve seen in a long time. Only once or twice did I think to myself ‘Oh that’s a little bit too green screen for my liking’. Though I do wonder if some of the effects at the end weren’t there really to please the Hollywood moguls who are trying to push 3D. Were all those falling buildings and that sort of thing there more to pander to these people rather than to really add anything to the plot or storyline? However allowing for that, a good film worth watching. Thoroughly enjoyed.